Cheaper by the Liter: How Women in Davao Are Beating the Sachet Economy

For decades, the sachet has been sold to Filipino families as the affordable way to buy everyday essentials. But here’s the math multinational corporations don’t want you to do: per milliliter, that tiny packet of shampoo or dishwashing liquid is one of the most expensive ways to buy anything.

In Davao City, a women-led refill network called Greentayo is betting that once shoppers see the real numbers, the plastic will disappear on its own.

Consider this: one reusable one-liter bottle of dishwashing liquid replaces up to 58 sachets. The same bottle filled with detergent replaces 52 sachets. Filled with shampoo? Up to 153 sachets.

The Dual Extraction Crisis

Greentayo’s founders — Patricia Melizza “Patmei” Ruivivar and Raissa Cinco Ling — identified what they call a “poverty premium” — a system that extracts wealth from low-income communities twice over:

Environmental Extraction. Filipinos use an estimated 163.7 million sachets every day — nearly 59.7 billion per year. Most are multilayer laminates that can’t be recycled economically. They end up in dumpsites, waterways, and the sea. The World Bank has documented how plastic packaging gives poor households low-cost goods while driving marine plastic pollution.

Economic Extraction. Here’s what the sachet really costs: an estimated ₱340 billion leaves local economies every year through mass-produced goods made elsewhere. The product might be manufactured in Mindanao, shipped to Manila to be packed into sachets, then shipped back to Davao to sell. Communities pay for the packaging, the trucking, and the celebrity endorsers — costs that never benefited the customer.

“They took advantage of our poverty,” Raissa says. “They give the illusion that it’s convenient and affordable. But if you compute it, it’s actually more inconvenient because of the plastic waste burden on the community and more expensive because what they pay for is the packaging, not the content.”

The Refill Revolution

Greentayo’s answer is elegantly simple: sell products by the liter, let customers bring their own containers, and keep the savings in the community.

The price difference is striking:

• A 60-milliliter refill of dishwashing liquid costs about ₱7.20 — about half what the same amount of a leading brand costs in sachets.
• Greentayo products cost 35 to 50 percent less than commercial brands

Where do the savings come from?

1. No packaging premium — no sachets to manufacture and throw away
2. Shorter supply chain — no round-trip to Manila for repackaging
3. No celebrity endorsers — community leaders who run refill points are the faces of the brand
4. Profits stay local — instead of flowing to distant shareholders

The products are all-natural, plant-based, and locally sourced: dishwashing liquid, laundry detergent, fabric conditioner, body wash, shampoo, soap, alcohol, disinfectant, air freshener, and essential oils. Coconut cooking oil, soy sauce, vinegar, and Davao coffee are next.

Why Women Lead the Refill Revolution

Greentayo isn’t just women-led — it’s built on a fundamental insight about who bears the hidden costs of the sachet economy.

Women manage household health and finances. They make the purchasing decisions, run the budgets, and look after their families’ wellbeing. They bear the brunt of the poverty premium every single day.

“Mothers are the anchors of the household,” Raissa explains. “They are the original circular economy.” 

The project is an initiative of Mothers for Peace Social Enterprise, Inc., which started as a women’s movement for peace founded by feminist leader and peace advocate Irene “Inday” Morada Santiago in 2003. Mothers for Peace is a direct response to the violence and breakdown of the peace talks following the bombing of the Buliok Camp of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF), which ended the ceasefire. The campaign was successful in its demand for a ceasefire and a return to the negotiating table. 

In 2014, Mothers for Peace created a social enterprise that focused on economic activities that will sustain the peace movement. It started the Food Revolution that promotes access to affordable healthy food in schools using a circular model through school gardens and community kitchens operated by women with food waste composted as fertilizers for the gardens. 

In 2025, it launched the Refill Revolution through Greentayo which aims to disrupt the sachet economy. Santiago believes that peace rests on secure livelihoods and a healthy environment. She describes Greentayo as a model built to break a sachet economy that “drains both the pockets of our mothers and the health of our oceans.”

What moves women in the barangays isn’t just environmental concern — it’s economic reality. Plastic waste draws worry, but what wins people over is learning how many billions of pesos leave their communities for multinational corporations.

“Women already run the neighborhood sari-sari stores,” Patmei says. “So why shouldn’t they run this business themselves?”

That question is built into Greentayo’s governance. Barangay Councils for Women (BCW) manage the Barangay Refill Eco Centers (BREC) that supply Green Corner operators in sari-sari stores and home-based micro-enterprises. All operators come from groups historically shut out of economic decision-making: women, seniors, youth, persons with disabilities, and Indigenous Peoples. The organization tracks results by gender, including how much household savings stay with female heads of household.

The Business Model: A Ladder of Opportunity

Greentayo operates like a consumer goods distributor — but one designed to keep wealth circulating locally:

The Green Corner is the entry point that matters most. For ₱3,500 — roughly the cost of treating friends to a buffet — a sari-sari store owner or home-based entrepreneur gets everything needed to start selling refills by the milliliter.

The math works:

• Sell half the kit to neighbors at a 20% markup
• Use the rest at home
• Each cycle generates about ₱300 in profit and saves the household about ₱800 compared to commercial brands
• Total benefit: roughly ₱1,100 per cycle — a 32% return on initial investment

The amounts are small, and that’s precisely the point. A Green Corner pays off at home first by cutting the operator’s own spending. Sales to neighbors add income on top. It needs no new storefront and puts little capital at risk, so a daily wage earner can actually start one.

Each Eco Center has historically paid back its investment within about five months.

Building an Alternative, Not Fighting a War

Greentayo’s strategy is deliberately pragmatic. “We’re not fighting the multinational corporations head on,” Patmei says. “We’re building an alternative. The most effective way of changing a behavior is to change the environment.”

Location matters as much as price. Sachets are sold everywhere, so Greentayo wants refills to be just as easy to find — starting a few steps from people’s homes. So it is building the community infrastructure to make refilling accessible and affordable to grassroots communities. 

The network is growing across Davao City:

• The Department of Health Region XI hosts “Green Mondays” 
• The Rotary Club of Downtown Davao backs a Barangay Refill Center operated by the Barangay Council for Women in Centro, Agdao
• The Royal Mandaya Hotel shifts to refill for in-room personal care amenities 
• Premier Heavy Equipment, Inc. is using Greentayo dishwashing liquid to clean their heavy equipment and offering Green Corner packages to their employees as a human resource benefit
• The Davao Tourism Association is partnering with Greentayo to promote refilling as part of sustainable tourism
• The Alsons Development Corporation is developing with Greentayo sustainable practices in communities they are building 
• The Interfacing Development Initiatives for Sustainability (IDIS) will independently audit sachet-diversion claims and included Greentayo in its Sustainable Business Network
• The Greentayo team is working with the Davao City government to create incentives for businesses that adopt refill systems and establish a “green tagging” system
• Schools, teachers’ cooperatives, laundry shops, parishes, malls, and tourism establishments are being approached as future refill sites

The Circulab Accelerator

Greentayo is in the pioneering cohort of Circulab, the circular economy accelerator run by Upgrade Innolab Inc. with funding from the European Union under its Global Gateway strategy. 

The project received an ₱800,000 grant to fund a nine-month rollout, turning its pilot into a permanent network of barangay refill centers and Green Corners across Davao City.

The grant pays for what grassroots projects usually can’t afford: refill hardware, starter kits for new operators, monthly community orientations, and marketing. Those monthly orientations are the main way Greentayo encourages households to adopt refilling.

For the founders, being selected confirmed the idea itself — that a grassroots initiative led by women can be a viable business that changes things.

They want what they learn to spread beyond Davao. Monthly data on operator income, wealth retained, and sachets diverted will feed a replication blueprint for other local governments. The Greentayo Builders Toolkit is published through Upgrade Innolab.

The Three-Year Test

The founders give themselves three years to reach about 15 percent of Davao City households — enough, they believe, for a refill economy that sustains itself. After that, they hope to become a regional circular economy marketplace selling far more than soap and detergent.

They think Davao is the right place to try. The city has changed its habits before — with its anti-smoking ordinance, firecracker ban, and anti-littering rules. Each was hard to enforce at first. Each is now normal.

The next nine months will be the real test:

• Households have to keep bringing their containers back
• Women running Green Corners have to earn enough to keep dispensers full
• Independent audits have to confirm that sachets are actually disappearing

The founders are confident about who will make that happen. “Never doubt the abilities of our grassroots women to lead the transformation of our society,” Patmei says.

The Math That Matters

Greentayo’s case doesn’t depend on persuading shoppers to care about the ocean. It depends on something more basic: a mother at a sari-sari store counter, working out which purchase leaves her with more money at the end of the week.

For decades, the sachet won that comparison.

Now there’s a refill on the shelf beside it, priced by the liter. In a growing number of Davao barangays, the refill is starting to win.

And when it wins, everyone wins — the mother’s wallet, the community’s economy, and the ocean itself.

Greentayo is proving that the most effective environmental solution might also be the most economically empowering one. By putting women at the center of the refill revolution, they’re not just reducing plastic waste — they’re building a model where communities keep their wealth, their health, and their dignity.